Retailers of stereo equipment find it necessary to provide demonstrations of equipment so that customers can evaluate and compare products they are considering for purchase. In today's marketplace for stereo equipment, there is a plethora of options ranging from fairly low-end equipment costing in the hundreds of dollars to sophisticated high-end equipment costing in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
For example, loudspeakers can cost less than $100 per pair up to thousands per pair or more. At each level, there are a variety of options provided by the typical loudspeaker manufacturer. For example, for the consumer looking for moderately high-end speakers for under $1000, there may be several products for floor speakers, several for bookshelf speakers, and so forth. Multiply these variations by the number of manufacturers carried by a well-stocked retailer and it is readily appreciated that the consumer may have to choose from among ten or more options that generally fit within the consumer's initial budget and performance requirements.
Not surprisingly then, providing the demonstrations required by consumers becomes a significant challenge for the retailer. FIG. 1A illustrates a typical prior art dedicated listening room that is crowded with a number of demonstration loudspeakers, sets 1–9. The speakers are crowded around the perimeter of the listening room in an unaesthetic and inconvenient manner.
For one thing, the number of loudspeakers that can be displayed and demonstrated is limited. The retailer may not be able to display/demonstrate all of the loudspeakers that the retailer carries, or alternatively, the retailer needs to have additional listening rooms, which is costly.
Also, a significant amount of complicated, costly, ungainly, and sometimes unreliable wiring is required to switch among loudspeaker sets 1–9. Moreover, the lengths of the wiring changes from set to set, meaning that loss characteristics are not the same for all sets. For example, if a tuner/CD player, amplifier, and switch are located adjacent loudspeaker set 1, the length of the cabling to set 5 will be much longer than to set 1. All other things being equal, there will be additional loss and noise associated with set 5 as compared to set 1.
Also, the consumer comparing the various sets has to walk from one set to the other in order to comparatively evaluate sets of loudspeakers.
Also, because the speakers are located at different positions in the room, the even-handed comparison that the consumer seeks is undermined by the different positioning of the speakers. For example, a consumer comparing set 2 to set 5 is not hearing a valid comparison because the effect of the room geometry and room material characteristics is different in the two cases.
Also, the existence of so many sets of loudspeakers in the crowded listening room in FIG. 1 biases the characteristics of the listening room unfavorably, creating undesired reflections and sound paths.
More generally, listening rooms are inherently biased in the sense that they are unrepresentative of the actual environment in which a consumer will install the equipment. For example, some retailers provide “dedicated” listening environments such as that of FIG. 1A, which is a special room set aside for speaker demonstration. High end retailers like Myer Emco™ and Tweeter™ often provide such dedicated listening rooms. While in some respects (e.g., reduced background noise) these dedicated listening rooms are an improvement over open-air non-dedicated listening rooms (discussed below), such dedicated listening rooms still suffer the significant drawback that they do not represent the actual environment the consumer will use. In short, the consumer will not hear a demonstration of what the speakers will really sound like in his/her home or office.
Other retailers simply use open-air non-dedicated listening environments, e.g., an open showroom in Best Buy™ or Circuit City™. Such non-dedicated listening environments often have poor acoustic characteristics and significant background noise. FIG. 1B illustrates a non-dedicated listening room in a department store. It can readily be appreciated that the performance of demonstration speakers 10 will be biased by the various reflections that result from the structure of the store, physical obstructions (e.g., aisles, stacks of products, cashiers, etc.), and from the significant interference created by extraneous background noise. Whether the consumer's intended environment is a home living room or the interior of a car, the conventional non-dedicated listening room will not provide the consumer with a demonstration of what the speakers will sound like in the consumer's actual environment. This is a significant disadvantage.
These are all significant disadvantages to the conventional approaches to demonstrating stereo equipment including loudspeakers. Other problems and drawbacks also exist.